The Silver Women: How Black Women’s Labor Made the Panama Canal

By Joan Flores-Villalobos

The construction of the Panama Canal is typically viewed as a marvel of American ingenuity. What is less visible, and less understood, is the project’s dependence on the labor of Black migrant women. The Silver Women shifts the focus of this monumental endeavor to the West Indian women who travelled to Panama, inviting readers to place women’s intimate lives, choices, grief, and ambition at the center of the economic and geopolitical transformation created by the construction of the Panama Canal and U.S. imperial expansion.

Joan Flores-Villalobos argues that Black West Indian women made the canal construction possible by providing the indispensable everyday labor of social reproduction. West Indian women built a provisioning economy that fed, housed, and cared for the segregated Black West Indian labor force, in effect subsidizing the construction effort and the racial calculus that separated pay in silver for Black workers and gold for white Americans. But while also subject to racial discrimination and segregation, West Indian women mostly worked outside the umbrella of U.S. canal authorities. They did not hold contracts, had little access to official services and wages, and received pay in both silver and gold. From this position, they found ways to skirt, and at times subvert, the legal, moral, and economic parameters imperial authorities sought to impose on the migrant workforce. West Indian women developed important strategies of claims-making, kinship, community building, and market adaptation that helped them navigate the contradictions and violence of U.S. empire. In the meantime, these strategies of social reproduction nurtured further West Indian migrations, linking Panama to places like Harlem and Santiago de Cuba.

The Silver Women is thus a history of Black women’s labor of social reproduction as integral to U.S. imperial infrastructure, the global Caribbean diaspora, and women’s own survival.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Jan 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9781512823646

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Cover: The Silver Women, How Black Women’s Labor Made the Panama Canal by Joan Flores-Villalobos

POLITICS AND CULTURE IN MODERN AMERICA

Series Editors

Keisha N. Blain, Margot Canaday, Matthew Lassiter, Stephen Pitti, Thomas J. Sugrue

Volumes in the series narrate and analyze political and social change in the broadest dimensions from 1865 to the present, including ideas about the ways people have sought and wielded power in the public sphere and the language and institutions of politics at all levels—local, national, and transnational. The series is motivated by a desire to reverse the fragmentation of modern U.S. history and to encourage synthetic perspectives on social movements and the state, on gender, race, and labor, and on intellectual history and popular culture.

THE SILVER WOMEN

How Black Women’s Labor Made the Panama Canal

Joan Flores-Villalobos

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2023 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved.

Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5128-2363-9

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5128-2364-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Flores-Villalobos, Joan, author.

Title: The silver women : how Black women’s labor made the Panama Canal / Joan Flores-Villalobos.

Other titles: Politics and culture in modern America.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2023] | Series: Politics and culture in modern America | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022017511 | ISBN 9781512823639 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781512823646 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Foreign workers, West Indian—Panama—History. | Women foreign workers—Panama—History. | Women, Black—Panama—History. | West Indians—Panama—History. | Panama Canal (Panama)—History. | Canal Zone—History.

Classification: LCC F1577.B55 F56 2023 | DDC 972.87/500496—dc23/eng/20220525

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022017511

To Feliks Garcia and Arthur Keller

CONTENTS

Introduction. Women of Silver and Gold

Chapter 1. The Land of Promise?

Chapter 2. A Scandal on the Isthmus

Chapter 3. A Moral Battleground

Chapter 4. Labor in the Domestic Frontier

Chapter 5. The Value of Death

Chapter 6. Private Honor and Public Lives in Panama City

Chapter 7. A Female Vanguard

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

Women of Silver and Gold

April 24, 1907, must have been a hot, muggy day in Empire, a busy industrial town near the train tracks of the Panama Railroad. Empire was the headquarters of the central division of the Isthmian Canal Commission (ICC), the administrative body that oversaw the construction of the Panama Canal. Empire was always a hotbed of activity, home to engineers, steam shovels, and foreign workers digging the deepest point on the Canal, the Culebra Cut. That day, Jane Hall, a Jamaican woman who owned a boardinghouse, walked out of the U.S. District Court of the Canal Zone after winning a civil case against one of her tenants.¹ Hall alleged that her tenant had vacated his rooms without proper notice and had not paid three months’ rent at the agreed price of twelve dollars Panama silver a month. After a lengthy case and appeal, the court ruled in her favor and awarded her the equivalent amount, nine dollars along with court fees, in United States gold.

Hall’s payout was notable because, within the U.S. territory of the Canal Zone, West Indians rarely received pay in gold coin. The payroll system unequally divided the wages and benefits of the official Canal workforce. Skilled workers, almost entirely white Americans, were placed on the Gold Roll and were paid higher salaries than for equivalent jobs in the United States. They received their wages in gold American dollars. Meanwhile, the more than 150,000 migrant West Indian men who made up the majority of the unskilled workforce were placed on the Silver Roll, only eligible for much lower pay rates in local coin, usually Colombian silver pesos. Officials, employees, and residents alike came to understand these categories as racialized—Gold as white, Silver as Black—even beyond the payroll. As all ICC services and facilities were designated for either Gold or Silver Roll personnel, the unique pay structure effectively extended racial segregation throughout the Canal Zone.

Into this arrangement came West Indian women like Jane Hall, who were for the most part not official employees of the Canal Commission. As Black women, they inevitably had to deal with the racialized labor scheme and spatial segregation that defined the Canal Zone, but as uncontracted workers, they did not have to function strictly within the roll system. Jane Hall owned her own independent businesses—three boardinghouses in Culebra that sheltered Silver workers who could not acquire decent housing from the ICC. She charged rent in silver because it was what workers had, but sometimes paid in gold for services and, as in her civil case, sued to receive back rent in gold. Other West Indian women similarly evaded the binaries of the roll system, moving across white American Gold spaces in their work as domestic servants, higglers (market women), and laundresses, and demanding gold as payment from their clients. West Indian women like Jane Hall played a crucial, double-edged role in the Canal construction. On the one hand, they built a provisioning economy that fed, housed, and cared for workers, in effect subsidizing the construction effort and its racial calculus. But, working outside the umbrella of the ICC, they also found ways to skirt, and at times challenge, the legal, moral, and economic parameters imperial authorities sought to impose on this migrant workforce—to function beyond the boundaries of silver and gold.

As historians since the 1980s have firmly established, the Panama Canal was realized as much through the exploitation of a racialized class of workers as it was by American ingenuity.² What is less visible, and less understood, is the project’s dependence on the domestic and care labor of West Indian Silver women.³ West Indian women sustained Silver Roll workers, providing food for those underfed by segregated Canal Zone cafeterias, laundering clothes daily for those who worked in dusty construction sites, and fostering links with legal and commercial institutions in their newfound homes on Panamanian territory.⁴ They were equally central to the survival of white Americans, who in the early construction years depended on the provisions of West Indian market women, as they had scant access to fresh foods from the commissary and lacked knowledge of local products. West Indian women took care of white American children and cleaned white American homes, physically maintaining the image of an orderly domestic sphere. In short, West Indian women’s labor made the United States’ imperial project possible.

The Canal’s construction was realized by a multiethnic and multinational migrant workforce, but the bulk of unskilled laborers came as contracted labor from the Caribbean. Nearly half of the Canal’s contracted labor force hailed from Barbados alone.⁵ When they arrived in the Canal Zone, these migrant workers found the beginnings of a company town—they were expected to reside, eat, and labor under the purview of the ICC. As a way to divide and control the labor force, the ICC organized all company services under the racially segregated roll system. Beyond differentiating pay, the ICC also provided white Gold workers with higher-quality housing, food, and recreation than it did Silver workers. Black West Indian or Silver workers received substandard food in outdoor mess halls, whereas white workers could sit at indoor tables with a decent meal. Silver workers could not stay in Gold hotels or enter the local YMCA open to white Americans. They received no paid vacation or sick leave. They lived in overcrowded, shared bachelor barracks and had limited access to married housing, whereas Gold Roll workers received private rooms or spacious, screened-in, family homes. Silver workers were assigned to the most dangerous jobs on the line.

This gap in services for Silver workers meant that everyday life and work in the Canal Zone depended on support systems outside of formal labor arrangements.⁶ It was instead Black women who fed, cared for, and sustained Silver laborers. In the earliest years of construction, authorities worried about worker retention and considered the benefit of having West Indian women in the Zone, surmising that West Indian men won’t work anyplace without their women.⁷ Women cooked and sold foods that West Indian men preferred, using local produce that the mess halls could not procure. They found and kept homes outside of ICC housing, where West Indian families could reside together. They supplemented, and sometimes surpassed, their partner’s incomes by performing paid domestic service for white Americans, contributing to family savings. The ICC encouraged this uncompensated labor in order to relieve their own burden in maintaining the Silver workforce.

West Indian women’s work extended beyond the Canal Zone. They also sustained the larger circuits of regional labor migration that staffed the construction. They kept homes on the islands, saved and distributed remittances, and took care of children left by their departing kin, supporting family members’ migration as part of household strategies. Women’s care work thus undergirded the racialized migratory labor system that enabled American imperial expansion in the early twentieth century. They did not merely provide support for projects of imperial infrastructure—rather, these undertakings could not have happened without them. The history of the Panama Canal cannot be fully understood without accounting for West Indian women’s labor of social reproduction, in Panama, the Canal Zone, the islands, and beyond.

Though equally subject to racial discrimination and segregation, Black women workers were not deeply integrated into the formal regulatory mechanisms of labor relations in the Canal Zone—they did not hold contracts, were not paid exclusively in silver coin, and had little access to official ICC housing.⁸ Though a few held contracts as teachers or nurses, most West Indian women worked outside the official realms of ICC authority as servants in Gold Roll homes or higglers who sold their wares across the Zone. Still, Canal Zone authorities sought and found different ways to manage this informal workforce. Through their legal and regulatory institutions, including police, courts, private investigators, and the sanitation department, Canal Zone authorities produced moral categories and legal frameworks that defined Black women as immoral, criminal, and pathological, even as they relied on their labor. These institutions and rules gave the ICC broad power to surveil, arrest, and deport West Indian migrant women.

In addition to illuminating how indispensable their labor was to the construction of the Panama Canal, this book also chronicles how West Indian women became a persistent source of anxiety for the U.S. Canal administration. West Indian women were particularly disquieting imperial subjects for the Canal administration since they migrated beyond the purview of the ICC, settling in the borderlands of the Canal Zone, where they could tend their own homes, care for their own families, and establish a degree of autonomy. Black women’s work, paradoxically undergirding the entire construction process while simultaneously seen as outside the realm of economic or productive labor, presented a problem of labor management for Canal authorities.⁹ These women’s provisioning of Silver workers exposed the incompleteness of integrating the Canal labor force into the lofty Progressive ideals of administrators as Silver workers mostly opted out of the company system of housing, food, and recreation in favor of West Indian women’s services. Women’s labor of social reproduction threatened the fantasy of successful imperial control of the Canal Zone enclave—even as the project depended on it.

West Indian women’s presence and labor in the Canal Zone thus fundamentally shaped a gendered and racialized mode of imperial governance during the construction era. As women’s labor lay outside their sphere of influence, Canal management upheld an imperial military-sexual complex that associated immorality, prostitution, lack of productivity, and disease with West Indian women.¹⁰ Administrators criminalized nonnormative intimacies among West Indians, making cohabitation without marriage and interracial relations illegal. They surveilled moral behavior in the Zone and Panama through local police and private investigators, used deportation and internment to punish West Indian women, and abandoned their responsibility to provide for West Indian workers, eventually expelling West Indians from Zone residences altogether at the end of construction.

Yet U.S. imperial authority in the Canal Zone, particularly in the early years of construction, was not a monolith. The ICC held a diffuse and contested sovereignty over the area, tested by its critics stateside and by its failures in retaining a labor force, regulating morality across its borders, and negotiating with Panamanian political power.¹¹ Imperial power also manifested in heterogeneous ways across different departments and administrators, who held competing ideas on how to govern the Canal Zone. While the upper echelons of the ICC spoke of morality, its white employees on the ground in search of company or entertainment often found themselves at odds with these expectations. West Indian women, who traveled to Panama without labor contracts, without paid passage, and without access to official company services, functioned mostly outside the main arteries of U.S. imperial authority. They settled among other West Indian migrants in Silver enclaves within the Canal Zone such as Jamaica Town, or in Panamanian neighborhoods like Guachapali, could skirt the roll system, and traversed spaces where U.S. power faltered—the river laundries of Taboga, the bars and restaurants of Bottle Alley, the boarding houses of El Marañon.

West Indian women thus developed a double-edged relationship to the U.S. imperial project and its violent exclusions—subsidizing its economic developments but subverting its moral logics.¹² West Indian women had a drive to secure material wealth promised by the Canal venture but migrated against the express wishes of American authorities and worked outside of their purview. They maneuvered within a legal system that criminalized their social and sexual lives. They disputed the devaluing of Black lives in the face of the tragic deaths that disproportionately affected Silver workers. And while they created infrastructural support for the contracted Black labor that undergirded U.S. empire, they also nourished West Indian immigrant communities by recreating the institutions and patterns of Afro-Caribbean life in Panama. U.S. imperial authority in Panama held an almost inescapable monopoly of power, but this power had its limits, and women capitalized on their narrow opportunities to carve out niches of material benefit and physical safety for themselves and their kin.¹³ They did so through specific gendered and diasporic strategies of social reproduction, mobilizing their flexible labor, legal and financial claims-making, and kinship networks to secure income and survival.

The Canal Zone was a moral universe jointly created by the contradictions of U.S. imperial governance and the paradoxical strategies of West Indian women. Women affirmed the extractive labor economy of the Zone while simultaneously remaking and redeploying its moral categories in a multisided engagement with imperial authority. West Indian women’s assertions of their own modes of living, working, and loving often stood in opposition to imperial expectations, such as in their continued commitment to cohabitation without marriage, made illegal in the Canal Zone in 1905. At other times, West Indian women repurposed the same racialized and gendered norms of morality used against them, such as when directing the language of deviancy toward fellow West Indian women. Their practices thus did not function within a tidy binary of accommodation versus resistance.¹⁴ Rather, West Indian women made their lives under conditions of dispossession and exclusion that forced them to navigate between the social reproduction of imperial racial capitalism and the social reproduction of West Indian lives.¹⁵ For example, when women leveraged a discourse of victimhood in front of Canal authorities to secure spousal support, they deployed hegemonic ideas about dysfunctional West Indian families in order to uphold the validity of their criminalized unions, thus forcing U.S. administrators to follow through on the financial and legal obligations that came along with the common-law partnerships that the same system criminalized. This edgewise negotiation of empire secured West Indian women’s survival, their economic futures, and the social reproduction of their kin at the same time as it affirmed the moral economy of the Canal.

As currency in exchange for their labor, silver linked Black migrants to imperial investments in infrastructure and global finance. West Indian women were excluded from formal employment and rarely registered on the official payroll, but the promise of money nevertheless drew most of them to the Canal Zone. For West Indian women, silver and gold were not just a form of potential wealth or a monetary transaction.¹⁶ They also served as symbols of racial discrimination, objects of contention with white bosses and customers, tokens of loyalty from a partner, links to their migrant family members sending remittances, or as the owed wages of a deceased loved one. Silver and gold run as threads throughout each of these women’s practices, tied as deeply to intimacy and kinship as they were to labor.¹⁷ While distinctly marked by the racial segregation of the Canal Zone, women yet managed to function outside of the strict margins of the roll system—they demanded to get paid in gold coin from their American customers and traversed across segregated spaces in the Zone in their everyday domestic work. Centering on Silver women locates them as pivotal, if unrecognized, economic actors within a history dominated by overarching narratives of imperial finance and contracted labor. West Indian women in Panama challenged the racialized economic parameters imposed by imperial authorities and mobilized understandings of wealth and value that accounted for their own economic and emotional priorities.

West Indian male laborers continue to dominate narratives of early twentieth-century Caribbean migrations as the essential symbol of diasporic connection and the Caribbean entry into modernity.¹⁸ The highly mobile, literate, modern, and politically active Black West Indian man recurs throughout histories of the period in figures like Claude McKay and Marcus Garvey, structuring what scholar Michelle Stephens has criticized as the masculine global imaginary of diaspora.¹⁹ This continued assumption of Black men’s predominance in early twentieth-century migrations—demographically, politically, and culturally—has diminished Black women’s powerful interventions within migrant Caribbean communities.²⁰ It has distorted, as well, our understanding of large-scale imperial projects, which historians have solidified as struggles between a fully formed imperial administration and male contract laborers while ignoring the essential everyday labor of social reproduction that operated in the shadow of infrastructural behemoths.²¹ Looking at West Indian women during this period turns our focus away from the desires of empire, the boundaries of the nation-state, and the narrowness of patriarchal Caribbean mythologies. It relocates the Canal construction period as a time of conflict, negotiation, and contingency between an imperial authority not yet solidified in its power and a growing migrant community that far exceeded the official workforce.²² This book prioritizes Silver women’s social, political, and economic creativity in the long wake of emancipation as they endowed free status with meaning, in the words of Jessica Johnson, through their migration and survival.²³

Black women’s survival in Panama was pragmatic and rooted in everyday, personal struggles. Women at times reaffirmed the moral categories of empire, mobilized these discourses against other Black women, and privileged individual profit over community safety. Nevertheless, their individual actions collectively maintained the migrant West Indian community by providing care, food, and domestic labor where U.S. authorities did not, and defending the moral status and financial futures of migrants. The fruits of their labor spanned the Caribbean, establishing business and legal relationships outside the confines of U.S. empire. They also collectively disturbed U.S. power and its norms of gendered inclusion, questioning the extent of the ICC’s incursions into West Indian enclaves and exposing the project’s dependence on women’s entrepreneurial labor. These strategies of social reproduction, embedded in long-standing Afro-Caribbean circuits of kinship and obligation, nurtured West Indian migrations throughout the early twentieth century, linking places like Harlem, Cuba, and Costa Rica. West Indian women’s strategies of social reproduction did not merely sustain them on an individual level; they also sustained the physical, economic, and political perpetuation of a global Caribbean diaspora.

Borderlands of Imperial Labor

Panama declared its independence from Spain in 1821 and entered into a voluntary union with Colombia as an autonomous federal state. Though the isthmus had long served as a crossing for people, goods, and ideas, it was generally considered a backwater of Colombia for most of the early nineteenth century. This would all change with the beginning of the Gold Rush, which precipitated a race to find a faster route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Between 1848 and 1856, Panama became the main point of transit for labor migration, the site of the world’s first transcontinental railroad built by the Panama Railroad Company (PCC), and a key node in America’s military and financial empire.²⁴ The construction of the railroad thrust Panama into two main developments of the nineteenth century—the expansion of informal U.S. empire, and the voluntary labor migration of nonwhite people toward the productive sites of imperial investment, primarily from the postemancipation West Indies. As with the Canal, these earlier projects of U.S. manifest destiny in the Caribbean basin, starting with the railroad, relied on the exploited labor of contracted Black male workers and uncontracted Black female workers who subsidized the social reproduction of this workforce through their domestic and care labor.²⁵

These patterns of labor migration would intensify with France’s attempt at building a canal three decades after the railroad’s completion. From 1881 to 1889, more than 84,000 West Indian workers arrived in Panama to work for the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique de Panama under Head Engineer Ferdinand Marie de Lesseps in an attempt to replicate the success of the Suez Canal.²⁶ These migrants came not only as Canal workers but also as merchants, domestics, clerks, photographers, doctors, pastors, and newspapermen.²⁷ They traveled by the regular fortnightly service provided by the Royal Mail steamship line as well as by the common small boats that regularly left Kingston’s harbor. Passage on a steamer cost twenty-five shillings.²⁸ By 1884 the Star and Herald had begun to call Colón the new Jamaica, and indeed the island and the isthmus grew closer during this period as the transit in people, merchandise, and news between them thickened.²⁹ In 1885, of 12,875 workers, 9,005 or 70 percent were Jamaicans.³⁰ During the decade of the French venture, Panama grew a reputation for lavish excess and corruption—an enclave of champagne, guns, gambling, prostitution, and rampant speculation. An American resident described the period as a carnival of depravity.³¹

At the time, most West Indians treated Panama as a brief sojourn. The number of returnees remained high throughout the French construction, outweighing emigrants by 1884. It was during this period that the mythology of the Colón Man—the West Indian male returnee from Panama who flaunted his newly acquired wealth with gold watches and rings—developed.³² This was not the experience of most migrants, though the ideal of the Colón Man retained a powerful hold on Caribbean consciousness throughout the following decades. Many Jamaican migrants received horrific injuries or perished from disease; the ICC’s chief sanitary officer William Gorgas calculated that, at the height of work under the French company, about a quarter of employees died per year.³³ Some never returned at all.

In 1889 the years of delay and grift finally led to the crash of the publicly owned Compagnie in a spectacular scandal. Some seven thousand West Indians repatriated, but many stayed and formed communities around Colón. The experience of the French Compagnie would shape the path of the United States fifteen years later in multiple ways. Its early efforts at excavation and infrastructure set the foundation for further American construction (the Americans would repurpose many leftover French structures and machinery). Its well-publicized failures provided a cautionary tale of immorality and mismanagement gone awry. Finally, its allure for West Indian workers seeking their fortunes meant that by the time of the United States’ arrival, Jamaicans had well-established routes of migration and exchange with Panama. Many were already there, embedded in the early communities they had formed in Colón.

In 1903 the Republic of Panama, aided by U.S. military intervention, declared its independence from Colombia.³⁴ A few weeks later, without the participation of any Panamanians, the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty granted sovereignty to the United States over the ten-mile-wide strip of land that was to become the Canal. The year 1903 thus marks the legal birth of the Panamanian nation and the start of American colonization of the Canal Zone, which extended ten miles on both sides of the planned 51-mile-long structure.³⁵ The two terminal cities, Colón and Panama City, remained under Panamanian sovereignty, but they were separated from the Zone by a porous and unregulated border. By crossing the street, visitors might pass into the sister towns of Cristobal and Ancon under U.S. sovereignty. Within the 436-square-mile territory of the Canal Zone, residents and visitors could experience the austere and highly standardized architecture of the American company town, be subject to U.S. law and police surveillance, and face strict racial segregation.³⁶ Though the Canal Zone and Panama technically functioned under separate jurisdictions, in practice these spaces were tightly linked; residents traversed across them continuously throughout the construction era for work and entertainment, while U.S. diplomats, administrators, and sanitation officials repeatedly intruded into Panama’s sovereign territory. West Indian women, less beholden to the patterns of construction, transited across these borderlands of empire as part of their daily work.

The ICC, which reported directly to Secretary of War William Howard Taft and worked under the leadership of the chief engineer, presided over the Canal Zone. On May 6, 1904, Theodore Roosevelt appointed John Findlay Wallace as the first chief engineer. He would only last a year. Roosevelt then appointed John F. Stevens, counting on the civil engineer’s previous success in building the Great Northern Railway. Stevens soon buckled under the challenges of the Canal and resigned in 1907. He was replaced by Colonel George Washington Goethals, whose militaristic leadership proved more durable, and who would oversee the construction of the lock-system canal to its successful completion in 1914. As the quick turnover of chief engineers in the early years indicates, the decade of construction was a moment of precarious transition during which the U.S. administration strained to govern the Canal Zone and bring its promises to fruition. Amid this tumult, as power and borders shifted, West Indians traveled to the isthmus.³⁷

The ICC sent labor recruiters across the Caribbean Sea to Barbados, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Grenada, and Guadeloupe. Each island government reacted differently. In 1893 Jamaica passed the Emigrant Labourer’s Protection Law, stating that anyone who wished to emigrate to certain proclaimed places as decided by the governor, had to obtain a permit and fulfill certain conditions. The law was revised in 1905 to directly address Panama recruitment efforts.³⁸ Jamaican laborers needed either a contract and a recruiting agent prepared to pay £1 to the Distressed Emigrant’s Fund or the backing of two people with property worth £10. The contract had to clearly state the terms of the job engagement and had to be approved by a police inspector. The British government stipulated these conditions as a safeguard against spending public money to assist Jamaicans abroad. It feared repeating the earlier financial disaster of repatriating Jamaicans who had left to work on the French canal. The law had the effect of limiting unskilled worker emigration from Jamaica since only workers who already enjoyed financial security could meet its conditions. This was borne out by the eventual predominance of Jamaicans in higher-paying skilled jobs in the Zone, such as artisans, managers, policemen, and teachers. Women who wished to travel to Panama ran into difficulty if coming from Jamaica since most of them could not obtain a contract in advance and were generally regarded as less financially secure. They would have to travel with some existing financial support, if they followed official routes. However, Jamaica’s proximity to Panama and previous history of informal migration meant that migrants could and did travel by their own means.

Figure 1. Map of the completed canal and Canal Zone, 1930. C. S. Hammond and Company, [1930..1935], accessed August 3, 2021, https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth288682/m1/1/, The Portal to Texas History, University of Texas at Arlington Library.

This was not the case for the islands of the Lesser Antilles, which lay further from the isthmus and lacked established sea routes to Panama. The ICC focused much of its efforts on Barbados, placing its main recruitment station, headed by agent William Karner, at Trafalgar Square in Bridgetown (now National Heroes Square). Barbados placed no financial restrictions on emigration until 1911, when the number of emigrants had already begun to decline. The government did, however, seek limited controls through the Emigration Act of March 18, 1904, which required a magistrate to oversee contracts. Almost half of the contracted labor force (19,900 workers) came from Barbados.³⁹ Yet more than 20,000 men and women arrived without contracts (historian Velma Newton estimates it could have been as many as 40,000).⁴⁰ During the recruitment period, Barbados is estimated to have lost a third of its population to Panama.⁴¹ Barbadian women could travel more easily to Panama than their Jamaican counterparts, as long as they could pay their passage. Migration from Barbados was thus markedly working-class in comparison to Jamaica, as they did not have to pay an emigrant’s fee. Barbados also served as a central terminal for migrants from other islands. For example, ICC agents recruited in Grenada, but most Grenadians traveled first to Barbados before taking the twelve-day steamer to Panama.⁴² The ICC also sent agents to Guadeloupe and Martinique in 1906, but the French government rescinded their permission to recruit in 1907. Some French West Indians nevertheless traveled on their own through Castries or Bridgetown.

Panama and the Zone presented new racial landscapes for migrants from majority Black islands, and an introduction to American-style segregation. However, many West Indians had experience migrating to different intra-Caribbean locations for temporary work and were likely accustomed to the uncertainties of labor migration in an imperial enclave. Migrants also traveled with their own prejudices toward West Indians from other islands—enmities exacerbated by differences in language, class, and skill level. Though West Indian migrants could not consistently rely on the British for support, they did at times request intercession on their behalf from the British consul in Panama, Claude Mallet. Their identification as British subjects often created tension with the governing bodies of the Canal Zone, who derided West Indians’ attachment to Britain’s colonial authority. However, the British consul and the islands’ colonial governments held little sway over the Canal Zone or their British subjects living under U.S. sovereignty. Though aware of the issues West Indians faced abroad, Colonial Office administrators more often than not left Panama migrants to fend for themselves and did not substantially challenge the ICC’s attempts to expand its legal authority over British subjects.

Despite their class and national differences, all West Indian employees of the Canal Commission had to contend with the roll system, which differentiated pay rates for skilled workers on the Gold Roll and unskilled West Indian and other foreign laborers placed on the Silver Roll. Gold Roll rates were 25 to 50 percent higher than for equivalent jobs in the United States. Silver Roll rates were far lower and had no relation to wages of equivalent workers in the United States. These rates were based on the wages prevailing for tropical labor in the Caribbean area, though they were higher than what these men could make in their islands of origin as plantation workers.⁴³ In practice, in the early years, this meant Gold employees were paid in actual gold American coin, while Silver employees were paid in local currency, silver Colombian pesos or Panamanian balboas. Workers on the line had to walk up to the pay car, which would make regular stops along the railroad tracks, and show their metal ID tag to receive their wages. By the end of construction, all workers came to be paid in American dollars, but pay rates remained sharply divided. The system was never exclusively a racial hierarchy and inconsistently categorized workers based on skill, nationality, and race.⁴⁴ In 1908 President Theodore Roosevelt issued an executive order that privileged citizenship as the main category for the Gold Roll and limited it to American and Panamanian workers. However, throughout construction, Goethals and other officials interpreted the laws in ways that made the system increasingly rigid and racialized. Though some foreign white employees from places like Spain or Greece were placed on the Silver Roll, they could also be paid under Gold Roll rates.⁴⁵ African Americans were placed primarily on the